ink
by Self-Inflicted Insanity
Summary: In which Light lost, but did not die. Having relinquished ownership of his Death Note and been imprisoned in solitary confinement, he quickly loses his mind. (Rated T for gore, self-harm, suicidal thoughts, and disturbing imagery.)
1. prologue i: failure

**an:** Just so nobody gets the wrong idea: this story is utterly and completely pointless. Light gets locked up in a cell in solitary confinement, goes insane, and then dies. That's literally it.

I really just wrote this story as a way to explore various emotions/feelings. I wasn't even going to post it, but... I figured, well, if there's even _one person_ out there who gets _anything_ from this story, that's a helluva lot better than it languishing on my laptop doing absolutely nothing.

As mentioned in the summary, though, there will be a lot of blood, self-harm, and disturbing imagery in this story, so be warned.

* * *

 **prologue i: failure**

 _I am Kira._

Watching the scarlet liquid dripping from his body to puddle on the floor around his feet and wracking his mind for what had happened only to see _everything_ , he felt his ribs crack open and let his heart drop, weighing twenty-three tons and pulling him down with it.

One small, tiny misstep, and he'd slipped on the edge, unable to recover his balance, tumbling into an unfathomable void of darkness.

There was no ground under his feet and he was freefalling blindly (his blood like shedding feathers behind him), the air rushing past him and making him dizzy, hysterical laughter building up pressure in his throat with every passing second because he knew—he _knew—_ that when he hit the ground, the force of the impact would shatter every brittle bone in his body.

Even though he was still falling, it was already over.


	2. prologue ii: spite

**prologue ii: spite**

No.

It wasn't over until he hit the ground.

He still had time.

As long as he was falling, he still had time.

As long as he was falling, he still had time, and as long as he still had time, he could find a way to turn this around.

Just because he'd lost didn't mean that he had to let them have the satisfaction of winning.

(When he opened his eyes, he found that he could see the stars.)

'Guess this is the end of all the amusement, Light,' came Ryuk's voice, and Light smiled.

"No," he said, pushing himself to his feet, an arm pressed firmly over where the blood was leaving him. "I'll provide you with some entertainment yet, Ryuk."

'Eh?'

"Get rid of it," he said.

(They couldn't bring Kira to justice if he was not Kira.)

There was a moment of silence, and then haunting, inhuman laughter rang in his ears.

'You're really _something_ , Light!'

And then the sound of the laughter slipped away, and he could no longer remember having ever heard it.

He didn't understand why Matsuda had shot him, and started crying, curling in on himself and hoping that he wouldn't bleed to death before they let him explain.

 _I am not Kira!_

* * *

 **an:** Basically, this story is working under alternate events in which Light gave up ownership of his Death Note (whichever one he was ownership of at this point... I'm confused by the all the Death Notes and the Death Note exchanges...) so that he would have no memories of being Kira. Mostly just to fuck with everyone.

He was freaking out so much though that he didn't think to do it until after Matsuda had already shot him.

Essentially I just needed an excuse for Light to be locked in a cell without memories of being Kira. This story is just weird, really. Be warned.


	3. chapter i: compulsion

**compulsion**

Outside it was raining.

He couldn't know for sure, of course; the cell had no window. But the white, too-bright lights, the gray walls and gray floor, the chill in the air that stroked his skin into goosebumps, the hair of his arms raised like a heckled cat—it all made him think that outside it was raining.

He'd been locked in the cell for what must have been weeks, by then, and it had, he thought, been raining the entire time. He thought he could hear the raindrops, in the silence, pounding away at the roof somewhere far above him. A faint din that subverted the silence. He thought he could hear it getting louder, day by day, the rain pouring harder and harder.

He imagined what it must have looked like, outside. Sky as gray as the ceiling of his cell, the air just as cold but significantly more wet. The water falling in sheets of silver needles, the ground a constant expansion of circles within circles within circles, disturbed only by bicycle tires, car tires, rainboots.

He imagined the water running down the center of the streets, little shallow gray streams, and felt like his mind was slipping along the same path, down concrete without purchase towards drains, tunnels of pitch darkness that echoed with the swishing of water and mysterious metallic clatters.

He'd adjust his wrists in their handcuffs, and imagine the sound echoing down those underground gutters, close his eyes and press them against his drawn-up knees to try to drown out the too-bright light that made his eyes ache like an overcast sky, imagining water-swept tunnels rushing with water and liquid darkness.

He twisted his hands in their handcuffs, examining his pale fingers, slightly blue with the cold, and the black ink that still stained them but was slowly fading.

The metal bit chilly teeth into his skin, and his wrists ached, but there was a chasm in his chest that ached more, empty like dark gutters rushing with torrents of rain.

His fingers itched at their black-stained tips, desperately scratching words over the fabric of his jeans that, like the sky, used to be blue but had been leached gray. The pain lay coiled somewhere between his heart, his throat, and the backs of his eyes; his tongue was dry, and all the words that settled there were desperate and tasted of ash, coating his mouth so thickly he couldn't speak. There was no warmth to give them life, to spark some kind of phoenix from the cold lump of cinders.

His fingertips itched where the ink was washing away with the rain, and he hated the handcuffs the most for rendering him unable to write.

With no pen to untangle them, his thoughts knotted, tumbling over and over each other with nowhere to go, repeating and repeating themselves till they lost meaning, and he couldn't determine the beginning from the end from the middle.

If he could write, he thought, then he could get out; he could make them understand, he could express himself, he could feel something other than insane and like they were right for locking him up.

He knew they were wrong, that he didn't do what they'd said he did; or at least, he'd thought he knew that they were wrong, but his thoughts tangled and he didn't know anymore. Was it really ink that stained his skin rather than blood? Was there a difference?

The question churned in his mind, over and over like yarn in a dryer (they were soaked and dripping from all the rain—they needed to be dried, strung up, aired out), until he bit his fingers till they ran with red ink, just to have something to write with.

The red looked black in the eerie, too-bright, color-bleaching light. Had his fingers really been stained black, then, or had they always been stained red?

He didn't know, but as he brushed dark, dripping letters over the walls, he was relieved because the itching had stopped (the pain that had replaced it was much more bearable).

His mind felt clear as he decorated the walls in gore, and with the ink dripping down his wrists—coating his arms, the silver shackles—he felt increasingly clean, and idly wondered to what it was that he was confessing.

The wall was dark with tangled thoughts when he finally sat down, feeling dizzy, fingers stiff and caked with ink.

He smiled, slightly, leaning his head back against the opposite wall and closing his eyes, listening to the rain he could hear pounding away somewhere far above him.


	4. chapter ii: solidity

**solidity**

He'd hated the handcuffs, at first. He'd hated them with a vehemence because they represented everything that kept him confined there.

More than the bars and walls of his cell, which simply locked him away from the world, the handcuffs were a blow against his self-autonomy; not only could he not freely move about the world, but he couldn't even freely move his own _body._

He'd taken to yanking at the cuffs till they cut into his skin, rubbing at his sore wrists till his fingers were smeared with his own blood, simply out of defiance; out of frustration.

Even after he'd been there for weeks and had given up on ever getting out, he kept yanking at the cuffs till they bit into his skin so hard the blood dripped down his arms, simply in order to feel _something_ aside from the _numbness_. Numb from the cold, numb from the monochrome, numb from the thoughts, numb from the doubt, numb from the questions and the answers he'd thought he'd known but wasn't sure of any more.

He wasn't even sure whether or not he was real, at that point, except for the pain of the metal digging into the skin of his wrists, pressing against bone. That was real. Maybe that was the only thing that was real.

Even when he'd been there for months and had finally given up on the thought that he was real, and that time was a concept that existed, he would keep yanking at the cuffs, rubbing his blood-slick fingers over the cold metal, simply because they were the only thing securing him to some semblance of reality.

He would feel weak and cold and feather-light, like any second he'd crumble away into ash to be dispersed on the breeze, and the cuffs would be the only thing holding him together. The cuffs would be a link to some shred of sanity that he could barely remember, and he would yank at them until they cut into his skin just to make sure that they wouldn't disappear.


	5. chapter iii: lethargy

**lethargy**

He'd been restless, at first, too much energy in his body to be confined in so little a space.

He'd felt desperate and raw, irritable and angry, the need to _move_ seeping out his skin from his bones, sending his thoughts in chaotic razor-blade pinwheels.

At least, he'd thought, his wrists were cuffed in front of him, rather than behind his back. It left him dignity enough to feel relatively human, to unleash his frenetic energy in a controlled, human way.

Sit-ups, crunches, planks, squats—exercises any person might do in a gym. Pacing made him feel like an animal—back and forth in front of the bars, back and forth, back and forth—but exercises were controlled; were human.

He was human; he could vent his energy in an organized fashion so that he could once again feel calm and collected, could consider his situation rationally, could plan how to get out.

With his hands cuffed in front of him, he had some dignity during meals, as well, still able to use his hands. It was awkward, to be sure, trying to eat with his wrists cuffed together, but he didn't have to bow down and eat with his mouth like a dog.

At least, he'd thought, they'd afforded him that, by not cuffing his wrists behind him; he was still human.

Weeks gone by with only the meager rations of water, stale toast, and an unidentifiable gray substance that didn't taste like much of anything, however, and he realized that it didn't matter.

He no longer had the energy to keep up his exercise regime; no longer had the energy to keep up his semblance of control. He could feel himself growing thinner, his muscles atrophying, his bones starting to jut through his skin. He couldn't exercise long before he collapsed, cringing, muscles spasming with fatigue.

Eventually, he could only curl against the wall and try to sleep, no energy left for anything else; no energy left to care. The ache in his stomach was as constant as breathing, and almost as unnoticeable with its normalcy.

He imagined that outside it was overcast and humid, constantly that time of late afternoon and early evening when the lighting was just dim enough to hurt.

He curled against the wall, shoulders slumped, limbs limp, head propped up by the cold concrete because otherwise he was sure it would fall off.

He was sure he'd never been so light, had never weighed so little—but he'd never felt so _heavy_ , his very bones made of lead, paper-thin skin stretched over them, his veins too close to the surface and a brilliant blue. He felt like he'd tear open, if he moved.

He wanted nothing more than to sleep, to close his eyes and sink into the pillow of darkness. It felt like he never did, eyelids limp at half-mast, staring at the gray wall in front of him; gray at just the dimness where it hurt.

If sleep came, it did so stealthily, and he didn't notice.


	6. chapter iv: incomprehension

**incomprehension  
**

They said solitary confinement was cruel and unusual punishment, a form of psychological torture; but he never felt like he was being tortured. He never felt lonely.

He could not remember a single instance, in his life, of feeling lonely; could not remember a single instance of craving company. He'd always sought out places where he could be alone.

In his cell, he was very alone.

Guards walked by, sometimes, on the other side of the bars, but he preferred when they didn't. Even when they didn't look at him, he hated that they were there; hated that they _could_ look at him, if they wanted to.

He'd never liked being watched; had never liked attention, though he'd always seemed to effortlessly attract it. When they were accusing him of wrongdoings he was almost completely sure he didn't do, they said he'd done it for attention, and he'd thought they were stupid; why would anyone want attention? Why would anyone be that _desperate_ for attention?

(All attention was were expectations you had to live up to.)

He sat there against the back wall of his cell, center of his spine pressed against cold concrete through the thin fabric of his shirt (he'd been almost completely sure the shirt was white, at first, but eventually changed his mind and decided that he was almost completely sure that it was gray), and stared through the spaces between the metal bars to the cell beyond.

The cell was empty.

The cell was empty, but he still hated that it was there; he hated that there was a possibility that somebody could be locked in there and could watch him.

The cell was empty, but he wished he had curtains he could draw closed, to cut off his cell more completely, so the paranoia that he was being watched would stop itching at him.

He was paranoid, he was almost completely sure. He was also almost completely sure that it was stupid to be so paranoid.

That didn't, he realized, stop him from being paranoid.

He found himself staring through the spaces between the metal bars into the empty cell beyond, eyes narrowed, and thinking about a quote he'd once heard.

 _If thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee._

At least, he was almost completely sure that was how the quote had gone. He was not sure at all who, or where, the quote was from, though. Maybe he'd messed it up, like he'd apparently messed up everything else in his life.

He was almost completely sure that, if he'd lived life right, he wouldn't have ended up in a cell. He'd still be walking around, free, and people would still be able to watch him. At least he'd known, then, that most of the people who saw him probably didn't care enough to notice him. And not being cared about, he'd figured, was close enough to not being seen.

In the cell, though, he knew that anyone watching him would care, because he'd been put there. There had to be a reason he'd been put there. They wouldn't have locked him away if they didn't care.

He'd always been wary of people who cared; had always been wary of caring. He felt like he should probably be lonely—that anyone else would have been lonely. But he couldn't have described what loneliness felt like.

(He'd always been leagues above everyone else.)

Loneliness, from what he'd gathered from descriptions of it, was a feeling of sadness for being alone, but all he'd felt about being alone was relief, and he couldn't have described what sadness felt like, anyway.

Sadness, as everyone described it, was blue, and incited the eyes to tears.

He had never felt blue.

The closest feeling he'd felt to the blue of what sadness should be, he thought, was a grayness more akin to depression or apathy: a gray like the concrete cell walls lit by the harsh artificial lights that he wished he could turn off, could block out with curtains so he could curl up in the embrace of darkness and know that nobody could see him; the darkness had always been comforting.

He wondered if there was something wrong with him.

All funerals where everyone else had been crying and sobbing and he'd felt nothing; the way everyone talked about death like it was something freakish and terrible, and he couldn't understand because there nothing more natural or more _inevitable_ , and all it meant was that someone was gone and wouldn't be coming back, and killing was _wrong_ but there was nothing wrong with _death_ and he'd _never missed anyone._

And he laughed, because he was just as human as anyone else, and yet he'd always felt alienated but he'd never felt lonely.

He laughed because he cared, and it didn't make any sense for him to care.

He laughed because he was locked in a cell for murders he might or might not have done, and the only things he missed were showers, coffee, and the ability to write.

He laughed because getting locked in a cell was moronic, but he couldn't complain, because everything else in the world was moronic, too.

He laughed because he was hungrier than he'd ever been, but no sadder and no lonelier, and he could no longer think of anywhere else he'd rather be.

He laughed because he knew that if anyone were watching him, they'd think he was going crazy.

He laughed because there might be something wrong with him, and it was hilarious that he couldn't stop _laughing._


	7. chapter v: memory

**memory**

He wondered what people would remember about him; if they remembered _him_ at all, and not just what he'd done.

He wondered if he'd ever made anyone smile. If he had ever, with simply his presence, made anyone even slightly happier to be alive.

He wondered if, alternatively, the world was a slightly better place with him being removed from it.

He hoped it was the latter; it would be better, he thought, to be locked away if it made the world a better place. He didn't want to be locked away and have people hurting because they missed him, especially when he did not miss them back and could not commiserate with their pain.

But it would be stupidly like life, he thought, for him to unintentionally cause pain in others that he could not understand himself.

He'd never sought out friendships because he didn't feel he needed them; and if he didn't need to be in the presence of other people, then they didn't need to be in his.

All they had ever been was envious, anyway, or wanting something from him.

They'd acted like they'd loved him, but it hadn't meant anything; they'd thought that he was perfect, not that he was human.

And, like the perfect person he was, he hadn't disappointed.

(Maybe when was committed for mass murder they'd finally realized that he'd always been hollow.)


	8. chapter vi: existence

**existence  
**

It didn't really mean anything, he thought, that he didn't remember killing anybody—or at least, that all his memories of killing people he was almost completely sure were dreams. He'd never trusted his memories; they were all in third-person. How did he know, then, that they belonged to him? How could he tell what was a memory of his life, and what was a memory of a dream?

He was starting to doubt, however, that he'd ever had a life outside of the gray cell, the artificial lights, the metal bars, the guards that occasionally walked by and slipped him food and water without looking at him.

They didn't look at him, so he couldn't know, from their reactions, anything about what they saw in him, and thus he couldn't know anything about how he appeared. If they'd looked at him, it would have been the closest thing he had to a mirror. He wondered if their expressions would have been as surprising as he was sure his own would be, if he could see it, or if he could even imagine it.

He couldn't remember, for the life of him, what his face looked like.

Sometimes, when they left him that plastic cup full of water, he wouldn't drink it for a while, despite the fact that his tongue was sandpaper in his mouth, as he tried to see if there was an angle at which he could see his reflection on the water's surface. But all he could ever see was the vague, dark shape of a head, features inscrutable.

He wondered what he looked like.

He could see that the skin of his hands, his arms, his feet, were pale and ashen, and that the ragged, unkempt, oily hair that fell into his face and got into his mouth was a dingy shade of brown. He couldn't remember what color his eyes were, but he figured that they were probably gray. They felt gray, when he looked out of them.

He guessed, also, that beneath his eyes were dark circles, because he hadn't been sleeping and when he pressed his fingers to the skin there, he found the area soft and puffy, collapsing under his fingertips. And if the veins in his wrists were so dark and close to the surface, visible easily through the caked layer of dried blood, then it must be even worse at the thinner skinner around his eyes.

He wondered if, at that point, he even looked alive. And he wondered if, on that line of thought, his existence could even be called living. Maybe he was simply a moving, breathing corpse whose heart hadn't yet realized it was supposed to have stopped beating.

He wondered if it would be better if his heart stopped. It couldn't matter to anyone else, he figured, if he was dead or alive and simply locked away; the results to them, he figured, were the same: he wasn't there. Did it matter whether or not he was still living and breathing somewhere?

Did it matter to him, he wondered, that he was alive? They could have had him executed. Was there a point to keeping him alive, locked away from everything?

People existed, he was pretty sure, in their interactions with others and the effect they have on the world around them. In his cell, he interacted with no one, and had no effect on anything.

If nobody heard him, and nobody saw him, he wondered, did he even exist?

 _I think, therefore, I am._

But was thinking enough? Could he keep up the will to live, simply in order to have these thoughts? Was that meaning enough to exist?

He stared at his mutilated wrists, scarred and scabbed; at the blood-tarnished handcuffs around them that no longer restricted him as much as they'd used to, he'd grown so thin (but the metal was as cold and biting as ever)—and he thought that it probably wouldn't be that difficult to end his life. Maybe that was what the people he was sure were somehow watching him wanted; just waiting for him to grow tired of the gray and the cold and the emptiness and just kill himself so they didn't have to.

He didn't fear the concept of death; a forever of nonexistence did not terrify him. But he did not, he thought, particularly want to stop living. Not when there were words, sentences, stories in his head that still begged to be written.

Whether those stories were true or false was of no consequence; there wasn't much difference between a truth and a lie anyway, he figured; not much difference between reality and a dream.

It didn't matter, he thought, whether he'd killed people and couldn't remember it, or whether he'd dreamed he'd killed people and couldn't prove that he actually hadn't. Either way, people were dead and he was locked away.

He wondered if, outside the gray walls of his cell, people had stopped dying.

He remembered, a few moments later, that people were always dying. Whether or not people were always living was, probably, a better question to be asking. Maybe life was nothing but a period of waiting for death to arrive.

If that were the case, then he figured he wasn't any less alive than anybody else, rotting away in a gray concrete box with metal bars on one side and spaces between them so he could breathe.


	9. chapter vii: forgiveness

**forgiveness**

 _It hurts,_ he thought, and he would have buried his face in his knees and clenched his eyes shut against the rough denim if it would help, but it wouldn't. The ache wouldn't leave.

More than the sting of metal biting into his wrists, it hurt to know that he'd been wrong; he'd done something _wrong._

Whether that was doing something considered wrong in the first place, or not doing the wrong thing well enough to not get caught, he didn't know, didn't care. He'd either done the deed wrong or had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time, _it didn't matter._ Either way, it hurt.

It hurt, and the gray walls were a constant reminder of that pain, always half-of-the-seconds-he-had-left from closing in on him no matter how many seconds passed.

He could have been better. All the different things he could have done to lead to different circumstances than where he was now—the roads untraveled haunted him.

It didn't have to have been this way; the decisions he'd made had lead him here.

Wrong decisions, he could affirm now, but the future was always murky and prone to delusion while hindsight was always twenty-twenty, once-obscured perceptions suddenly so sharply defined that it _hurt._

And he would have buried his face in his knees and clenched his eyes shut against the rough denim to block it out but it wouldn't _help_ , the concrete pressing cold against his spine, the bottoms of his feet, the bones that ached from sitting, and he could close his eyes but his wrists were chained together and he couldn't cover his ears and the gray walls were _screaming_ at him.

 _You were wrong you were wrong you were wrong you were wrong you werewro ngyouw erewrongyou werewrongyouwerewrongyouwerewrongyouwere—_

He was wrong, and he thought of Jenga blocks, how one wrong move could bring the whole tower toppling down.

He'd made a wrong move, and the Jenga blocks of his life had been scattered and buried like bodies in a graveyard, marked with headstones that were all that was left to tell the story of his life.

His mistakes were buried, and he could leave them there, but there was nothing else to do in the cemetery of his mind but dig them up and chew on them like a dog, leaving them marred with toothmarks and stripped of blood and flesh.

Freshly mutilated, nearly beyond recognition, he could bury them again somewhere more aesthetic, more hidden, and leave the tombstone epitaphs incorrectly labeling empty coffins and slowly weathering away with the rain and the moss and the rot and the decay and the passage of time that left nothing unchanged.

Slowly, he forgot.


	10. chapter viii: insomnia

**insomnia**

Sleep, like everything else in the world, had forsaken him.

He lay on the floor with his knees and elbows tucked against his chest, the concrete pressing bruisingly against his temple, his shoulder, his hip.

He gazed sightlessly at the concrete wall in front of him. It was too bright to close his eyes, the light shining red through the thin skin of his eyelids.

His arms were tingling, starting to go numb. His fingers prickled when he twitched them. The seconds kept counting up towards an unforeseeable end point set somewhere along the path to infinity.

He shivered against the cold floor and pulled his legs tighter to his chest. All he wanted to do was sleep, but it was too bright to close his eyes.

He missed the darkness and the way it smothered the steady military-marching of time.


	11. chapter ix: malaise

**malaise**

He felt like he should be doing something.

But there was nothing to do in the cell, aside from counting.

So he counted.

He counted the bars of the cell (there were sixteen when he counted from the left, seventeen when he counted from the right; he wasn't sure which number was correct, no matter how many times he tried).

He counted the hairline cracks in the cement of the floor, the ceiling, the walls (altogether there were thirty-four spider-webbing networks of cracks, which branched off and changed direction a total somewhere between 1,681 and 1,707 times, depending).

He counted how often the guards came around (but they came by so infrequently he could never remember if it was the third or the forth time since he'd last started recounting, in which case he'd drop the number and start again from zero).

He counted the drips from the faucet plinking against the metal sink basin (but the dripping was so regular that he easily tuned out the sound, and was really only counting the drips that he noticed, and he could never guess how many he had missed).

He counted how many times the harsh, artificial lights would flicker for however long he was paying attention (they flickered more when he wasn't), and tried to count how many lights there were hidden behind the piece of opaque white plastic by how many shadows he had (he was pretty sure the number was seven).

He counted the seconds (but knew that it didn't mean anything, because sometimes he counted fast, and sometimes he counted slow, and he always lost track somewhere around 7,000, anyway, at which point he gave up and started counting how many times he could knock his forehead against the wall before it started hurting so much that he stopped being able to remember the number).

He counted because he felt like he needed to do _something,_ and there was nothing else to do.

He counted because he felt like he was forgetting about something, and he thought that if he tallied everything up then he'd be able to figure out what he was missing, because he didn't think he could figure out what _wasn't_ there until he knew for certain what _was_ there.

He counted, and he was _certain_ that he was missing something, because if he wasn't missing anything then he'd be able to actually get the same number of something more than twice in a row.

He was, he figured, obviously counting wrong, and the only way to remedy that mistake was to count again.

At least he had all the time left in the world, he knew, to get the numbers right.


	12. chapter x: malfunction

**malfunction**

His entire body was aching, like he wasn't put together correctly.

His eyes were too large for their sockets, feeling like they were bulging in his face and pressing back against his brain, and he wanted to claw them out so that he could shave them down and then press them back in.

His neck was twisted on wrong to his skull, the screw threads jarring against each other because they weren't lined up, and he wanted to remove his head so he could set it back on straight.

His back was stiff and stuck as if with dried glue, and he wanted to bend himself so far backwards that it would break, crack at every joint till the connections between each vertebra were so loose that he could curl himself like a snake.

His fingers were grating at the knuckles like nails on a chalkboard, and he wanted to take them in his teeth and pull them out of their joints so he could chew on the ends of the bone till they were smooth from gnawing and lubricated with saliva so they'd slide easily back in.

The tendons in his knees were pinched under his kneecaps like the cap of a pen pinching the skin of a palm to blistering, and he wanted to remove his patella and straighten out the tendons like strings in an old grand piano before replacing the lid of bone.

The muscles of his calves were cramping, wires drawn painfully tight, tight enough to be a tourniquet, and he wanted to slice away his skin so he could unhook his muscles from whatever was pulling them so that there'd be some slack.

Almost everything _ached,_ and if it didn't ache then it _throbbed._

He thought that maybe, if he could take himself apart, he could put himself back together so everything _fit._


	13. chapter xi: dissociation

**dissociation**

There was something wrong with his body, and it no longer felt like his.

For periods of time his legs and arms would become cold and numb, like the flesh was dead, and then they would start tingling and burning like he was iron in a furnace, glowing orange and malleable, the floor pressing against him like it was bending him into a different shape.

He was pretty sure his body was not supposed to feel like that.

Even pain no longer helped to ground him, and he watched blood ooze down his wrists like it was happening to someone else, someone he cared nothing for, and the pain felt distant, like an echo.

He couldn't stop his hands from shaking. They vibrated, possessed, when he tried to hold them still, and seemed to blur at the edges.

When he pressed fingers to his legs to try to see if he was still there, he could tell he was touching something, but it did not feel like a part of him.

It felt sometimes like he wasn't in his body, floating above and slightly behind himself, disconnected and watching.

(He looked like a cadaver; death warmed-over and decorated in gore.)

He found himself staring at the back of his hands, blue veins threaded beneath achromatic skin smudged with burgundy, and when he pressed his fingers to his wrists he could not feel a pulse.

His stomach was concave, and when he dragged his arms over his ribs he counted twelve on one side and eleven on the other. (He wondered what had happened to the missing one.)

Every once in a while as he was drifting in and out of consciousness his entire body would spasm, like he'd been hit by a defibrillator, and his heart would be beating wildly, his mind in a flurry of lightning-colored panic, and as he calmed back down he'd wonder what was trapped inside him and trying so desperately to get out, throwing itself violently against the walls of its cage of flesh.

Sometimes when he told his body to move it wouldn't, the signals lost in transaction. Other times, he'd find his body moving without his having told it to, and could only watch in bemusement as his fingers traced designs on the smooth concrete or widened the holes in the knees of jeans thread by thread.

Sometimes he thought his fingers were writing words, but when he tried to figure out what they were saying they would stop, like it was a secret he couldn't know. He'd glare at them with all he had, but they were unaffected and would not tell.

Sometimes he'd snap back into his body and realize he was walking around, and have no idea why, or he'd look around his cell and feel suddenly lost and displaced, wondering when he'd moved from one side to the other and how that had happened.

The food tray always seemed to be on the floor of his cell, empty, and he could never remember when he'd last eaten; he could never remember eating, but he knew he must have, or else he wouldn't be alive. But then again, he sometimes caught himself drinking from the sink without having made the decision to do so, so maybe his body had developed an autopilot and didn't really need him any more.

Maybe his body had never been his to begin with. Hadn't he killed people without remembering doing so? Maybe that was why he was locked up.

He pondered that for a while, decided that he didn't like the thought of not having control of his own body, and started biting his knuckles, consciously, just to prove that he could.


	14. chapter xii: apathy

**apathy  
**

He didn't miss much, despite the gaping hole in his chest. He'd tried to stick his cuffed hands through it a few times, only for his fingers to press up against the skin drawn tight over the bones benath his shirt.

It was odd that his chest was still intact, when it felt like it was gaping and empty. Some large part of him was missing, something even more than what he was losing.

He was losing his mind, he knew. It was rotting out in his head, self-destructing with nothing to occupy it, breaking down, decomposing.

One time he woke up to find shards of his skull on the floor, and when he reached he found that he could touch his own brain where his skull had shattered. It was an odd sensation; his brain was rubbery against his fingers, but he could not feel his brain being touched because brains contained no nerves for detecting touch, and could not feel anything.

He woke up again, afraid to tilt his head to the side lest his brain fall out, only to reach up and touch oily hair and hard skull, and realize that it had been a dream.

Which was odd enough, in and of itself, because he didn't usually remember his dreams.

All he could remember were blurry faces, hazy names, a pair of eyes that bored into him as blank and unrelenting as the walls of his cell. Except that, unlike the walls, when he woke up they faded away. The walls, though—those stayed.

Once when he was staring at nothing, thinking of nothing, he wondered if that was what it felt like to be a wall.

He knew, though, as soon as he had the thought, that it wasn't. Walls never had such thoughts.

Maybe when he was dead he'd be like the walls. But then again, walls were not dead, because they had never been alive, and you could not have one without the existence of the other.

He wondered if the eyes in his dreams were dead. They never blinked, boring into him deep down past his skin and bones to the demons sleeping in the depths of the void in his chest.

He must have inner demons, he thought, but they were long silent, bored to death by blank walls and a mind that couldn't remember.

He wished they'd wake up, sometimes, just so he could have someone to talk to.

He wondered what it was like to have an intelligent conversation, if he was even capable of such a thing any more.

He wondered if he couldn't remember anything because his mind had locked it from him as some kind of defense mechanism, some symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder; or if he really had forgotten everything, some kind of early-onset dementia.

He stared up at the ceiling, which was really just another wall, and wondered if this was what they wanted for him.

He didn't want to die, he thought, but at the same time he didn't want to be alive.

He didn't think that this was what they wanted for him. He didn't think they deserved that much credit. More likely, he figured, they just didn't know what to do with him. If they couldn't let him go, and they couldn't kill him, it was easiest just to lock him away and pretend he didn't exist.

Maybe they'd forget about him, the way he'd forgotten. Maybe they already had. Maybe he was as abstract a being to them as they were to him.

Everyone except the guards who still came by in their visored helmets. He wasn't even sure if they actually had faces. He wasn't even sure he quite remembered what faces should look like.

The faces in his dreams, he was pretty sure, weren't always human, but he couldn't remember enough to be sure.

He thought maybe the words he'd written on the walls would help him hold onto something, but he'd read them so many times that they no longer held any meaning, nothing but lines of dark brown-red creating abstract patterns on gray concrete. He sometimes found his eyes tracing over them like a stream rushing mindlessly over sticks and stones.

He thought that maybe this was the worst punishment he could have been subjected to, to be locked away with nothing to do but watch his mind slip away and scratch at the scabs on his wrists and hands till they started bleeding again and stopped itching, but he could no longer bring himself to care. There was no reason to be upset, and nothing really to be upset about.

He wondered if that meant that he should be happy.

He figured, though, that it didn't really matter whether he was happy or upset, or anything else for that matter; emotions were just chemicals in the brain, anyway, and his was decaying.

Just the fact that he could still feel cold, and hunger, and pain—that he could even still have these thoughts—was, he figured, a marvel in and of itself.

Looking down through his hair, he flexed his numb, blood-stained fingers, listening to them crack, and smiled slightly even though there was no reason to.


	15. chapter xiii: misery

**misery**

There was something vague and malevolent pressed up against the inside of his spine behind his sternum, heavy inside his ribcage, and all he could do was curl up around it and hope it didn't leave him.

It was nice to have some company.


	16. chapter xiv: relativity

**relativity**

He must have fallen asleep, because when he opened his eyes his cell was different.

One of the cement walls had been removed and replaced with a wall of glass. He could see the other cell on the other side. There was a man sitting there with his back against the wall, knees tucked up to his chest, staring back at him through strands of oily, unkempt brown hair.

He stared at the man, gaze tombstone-gray, and the man stared back, eyes a honeyed but lightless umber.

Seeming to reach an unspoken agreement, they both slowly pushed off from the wall, standing and walking closer, watching each other like two wraiths who, when alive, had never believed in the supernatural.

He tilted his head slightly, narrowing his eyes. The man did the same.

Slowly, he raised his cuffed hands, pressing both grimy palms to the glass, the other man pressing his palms to the other side. They could almost have been touching, if the glass weren't between them.

He wondered what purpose the people who had imprisoned him there could have for installing the glass, letting him see someone else aside from the guards who slipped him water and food like they were going against the rules and if they looked at him, if they at all acknowledged what they were doing, they would be caught.

(He drank the metallic water and ate the tasteless food and felt grateful that he wasn't dead.)

He wondered what possible reason they could have for showing him a fellow prisoner. Could it be a warning of some kind, letting him see this man as an example of what he himself would become (hollow cheeks and sharp bones and sunken eyes and hunched shoulders and shuffling steps and raw wrists and skin smeared with shades of scarlet and burgundy)?

He offered a shaky smile, and the man grimaced in return.

He looked away, but when he glanced back up, the man was still watching him. He felt unnerved, all of a sudden, and quickly turned, walking back to his corner and sitting on the floor with his legs hugged to his chest, his back to the man on the other side of the glass.

He thought he might have fallen asleep again, but when he opened his eyes and glanced over his shoulder, the man was still there, huddled in the far corner of his own cell and watching him back.

He looked away again, shoulders hunching further, feeling the panic well up within him when the feeling of the other man's eyes didn't leave.

He'd liked it better when he was alone, when nobody was _watching_ him.

The sensation of eyes never left the back of his neck, and he shifted his wrists in their cuffs, fingers scratching at the scabs, scars, dried blood on his wrists, fingernails bitten down and lined with black grime. His fingertips had been burgundy, but very quickly smeared with scarlet.

He rubbed his fingers on his arm, streaking the color there, but the red wouldn't leave his hands and he stuck his fingers in his mouth and sucked on them. They tasted like copper, steel, and salt. (They tasted better than the food that the guards slipped him, which tasted of nothing.)

He started biting down on his fingers, for no good reason. He just felt like it.

It hurt. He didn't stop.

It still hurt, and he bit down harder, not even really thinking about it (it was something to focus on; something to _do_ ; something to distract him from eyes on the back of his neck).

His mouth filled with the hot taste of copper, and he pulled his hand away to find his fingers dripping red, his skin wrinkled and slick with saliva and indented with the impression of teeth.

He licked his lips, and the blood there.

Clenching his fingers in his shirt, he glanced back over at the glass.

The other man was still watching him, hands clenched in his own shirt, which was gray but streaked with blood and grime. The same went for his jeans, which were unraveling at the knees, and he figured that the man must have been locked up for at least as long as he had been.

He looked away, and wished the man would stop watching him. There was no need to watch him with such scrutiny when they were going through the same thing.

He assumed they were going through the same thing, that the other man had also been locked up because he'd killed people.

That would make that man a killer.

Suddenly curious, he looked back at the man again. The man was still watching. Maybe the man had had the same thought, because when he started crawling back towards the glass, the man crawled towards him.

He never saw the man blink, and there were dark, bruised-looking circles beneath the man's eyes. It made him uneasy, feeling familiar in a way he couldn't quite describe, like something he'd seen in a dream.

He could see no shadows hidden behind those eyes; no remorse, no guilt, no happiness, no sorrow, no anger—nothing. Cold and calculating and perfectly vacant: shadows in and of themselves.

Maybe this prisoner was a heartless murderer, after all.

He found himself staring at the blood drying on the man's thin lips; it looked incriminating.

(He reflexively licked his own, and realized that he had dried blood there, as well.)

He looked away, then, because there was nothing more to see, and leaned back against the glass, closing his eyes.

The other man must have done the same, because he could feel the warmth from the other man's body on the other side of the pane.

The heat seemed to seep into him, and he found himself relaxing, only then realizing that he'd been cold and tense for as long as he could remember.

He fell asleep with a remorseless murderer at his back, and felt as safe as he'd ever felt.


	17. chapter xv: perception

**perception**

The man was still staring at him.

The man never stopped staring at him.

He wondered what the man saw, when he looked at him; what it was about him that could possibly be so interesting.

But he never asked, and the man never said. Mostly the man was silent, just staring.

It sent shivers up his spine.

Sometimes, though, when he started laughing, he would hear the echoes of the other man's laughter join in, the both of them laughing for no reason; laughing because they were alone but together in their crumbling sanity (if either of them had ever been sane in the first place).

When they finally stopped, he'd glance over at the glass, and see the other man grinning at him.

It wasn't a nice grin, and the man's eyes were still empty, but it was a nice feeling nonetheless.

Sometimes he'd wake up to the sound of the man's sobs, and he would just sit there listening to it, unable to stop his body from shaking; it was a hollow, haunting sound, and made him think of cold rain on his skin and church bells ringing far off in the distance.

One time he woke up to screaming. At first he thought it was the other man, until he realized his throat was being torn apart by the sound, but he didn't know why he was screaming; the afterimages of whatever had terrified him were already gone.

But when his screaming finally stopped and he had caught his breath enough to glance over at the other man, the murderer was staring back at him apathetically.

He looked away, long, greasy hair falling into his face and hiding the way the corner of his lips quirked upwards.

It was oddly comforting to know that nobody cared.


	18. chapter xvi: contempt

**contempt**

There were words written on the walls, but they were lies.

They weren't _his_ words. They were the words of someone still hoping for some kind of escape, still believing his imprisonment was some kind of mistake, still thinking he had any kind of worth or meaning; they weren't _his._

Revulsion was crawling up his throat like large-bodied spiders, and he felt a need to completely erase the words he'd once hoped would last forever.

 _(Erase them erase them erase them erase them ERASE THEM ERASE ERASE ERASE ERASE ERASE—)_

He somehow knew that water could not wash the words away, knew that the only way to erase them was to smother them, so he pressed the cuffs deep into his wrists until they streamed with scarlet ink and smeared it all over the walls, over the words, hiding them beneath the red.

He stood back, and through the veil of sanguine he could _still read them they wouldn't go away they wouldn't—_

He screamed, then, and pressed the cuffs deeper into his flesh, letting his arms hang, collecting ink in his cupped palms to spread another coat over the walls, the spiders crawling through his veins and biting him, biting him, biting him, their venom setting his nerves on fire and their legs _itching_ , itching all under his skin and up his spine to the base of his brain, and the spiders were scuttling over his _eyes_ in shifting masses of _black_ but he could _still read the false words,_ false and _wrong wrong wrong wrong WRONG—_

The venom had set his muscles on fire and they turned to ash and crumbled, leaving him a broken pile of bones stretched over with skin like spiderwebs, and he finally realized that he was killing himself.

He laughed, giddy, because it had been a long time coming and it felt _right_ , and on his knees he prepared to press the cuffs deeper still into the arachnid-filled pathways beneath his skin until there'd be no coming back from it, when he heard a sharp gasp next to him and froze.

Slowly, slowly, he turned his head, eyes widening to see the other man beyond the glass, cuffs pressed into his own bleeding wrists and gazing back at him steadily.

The man's gaze was a challenge; a promise:

 _If you die, I'm dying with you._

He felt his hands shake, and he couldn't hold the man's gaze, looking down at the blood pouring from his wrists _,_ over his hands, dripping from his fingers onto the concrete floor and puddling there like the scarlet in the hourglasses on the bellies of the black widows still crawling over his eyes.

The floor twisted beneath him and kicked him in the side of the face, and the last thing he saw was a glimpse of the other man's serene expression before he was swallowed by a darkness that accepted him like water accepted a stone.

When the light broke over him like an epiphany and pulled him gasping to the surface, his wrists were wrapped in bandages, there was salt dried on his cheeks, and the other man was staring at him with eyes like necropolises.

 _Why did you stop?_

He looked away, because he did not know the answer.

He thought he could feel the murderer on the other side of the glass laughing at him soundlessly.


	19. chapter xvii: fragility

**fragility**

When the glass shattered, the world shattered with it.

Pieces of mirror embedded in his skin, he slowly reached out for a shard on the floor, shakily staring at the horrified reflection staring back at him, before, entire body trembling, he looked up at the gray cement wall that the mirror had fallen from.

A gray cement wall with no cell on the other side.

His heart was pounding in ears, deafening, so loud he could hardly see straight; but he could still see enough to tell that the eyes reflected back to him in the glass shard were a honeyed but lightless umber.

His fingers tightened, knuckles white, and he was not breathing.

(Everything he'd thought he'd known was a lie.)

There was no other prisoner; it was just him.

It had always just been him.

The shard of glass slipped from blood-slick fingers as the ground slipped out from under him, the world whirling, breaking apart and reassembling around him, and he was lying on what seemed to be the ceiling with his face pressed against his knees, laughing and sobbing and on the verge of vomiting from the vertigo.

After what felt like an eternity there was a _click_ as all the broken pieces slotted into place _,_ and everything went still.

When he opened his eyes, the only things that were broken were the shards of mirror scattered over the ground and the sliced-open flesh of his fingers. He carefully closed his eyes again.

It felt like there should have been ash falling; softly, silently covering everything in a dusting of gray, and his heart slowing, numbing, petrifying.

All around him and inside him was a profound sense of silence

He could shatter into thousands of tiny pieces, he knew, just like the mirror had, and it left him terror-stricken even to breathe.


	20. chapter xviii: resignation

**resignation**

Time was moving like a glacier (which was really, he figured, just a river with no concept of time—thereby negating the entire concept of time of any of its validity), and Life had him trapped but Death had him cornered, and was waiting.

At first, at this realization, he'd felt frozen; carved of marble and laced all over with hairline fractures, no blood flowing in his veins and no warmth anywhere.

Then he'd felt broken; a puppet with all its strings cut; a robot gutted of its wires.

Then he'd felt desolate, like a barren wasteland ravaged by nuclear explosions; devoid completely of both life and the possibility of it ever again existing.

Then he'd felt immutable, ancient, inhuman, void (as would the god of a dead world).

And then, eventually, he felt nothing at all.

He faded in and out of existence like a fog, and each time he closed his eyes he thought it would be okay if he never opened them again.

(But he wasn't about to let Death win their waiting game.)


	21. chapter xix: expectation

**expectation  
**

When he opens his eyes to see in front of him a ballpoint pen and a black notebook, he thinks that for a moment his heart stops.

He reaches towards the items with weak, trembling fingers, brushing the items lightly with his fingertips as if they'd crumble away like dust.

They don't, and he thinks that maybe he's dying as he picks up the items, almost surprised when they have weight, and he clutches them so hard he can feel the press of his phalanges through his skin.

The pen gripped in a fist and the paper hugged to his chest, he can't stop trembling, his eyes feeling as wide and watery as the world that he hasn't seen in who knows how long.

He thinks the feeling is elation, the sensation of a dove trapped inside his chest and beating its wings wildly against the bars of his ribcage as it tries to escape his hollow body to become a free and abstract entity that can be held by no walls.

The feeling is too intense for how weak he has become, and he's sure that his bones are so brittle that any moment they will shatter—not the graceful rupture of a wine glass, glittering shards of diamonds in all directions, but the inelegant splintering of old and rotten wood, too decayed to make any sound louder than a dying breath of relief.

He shakes, trembles, shivers, feeling so close to falling apart because gripped against his chest is all that he can ever remember wanting.

When he eventually brings the items out in front of him, arms handcuffed together and still shaking, the pen and notebook are smudged with red-brown fingerprints, and his eyes have never felt so gray as they turn into rainclouds and he can hardly see through all the water, thunder shaking him down to his bones as he shoves the items away from him and tries to scramble away, jerking to his feet only to crumple again to the ground, cracking his head slightly against the concrete.

He clenches his eyes shut, but the afterimages behind his eyelids are blinding.

When he opens his eyes and stares at the items again, they're lying in a puddle of half-dried blood that makes his cuffed wrists ache in memory.

He's struck with the sudden thought that blood used to smell like copper, and he wonders when it was the scent became so normal that he stopped being able to notice it.

He caters to the pain in his wrists and head for a few moments, acknowledging the throbs as existing and then filing the thoughts away as transient and therefore irrelevant information, before slowly pushing himself into a sitting position, ignoring the way the pains flare.

He slowly drags the items from the puddle of half-dried blood, wiping them on his tattered, grimy jeans with hands that he wishes fervently would stop shaking.

There are more emotions coursing through him then he can remember ever feeling at once, the monotonous hours of no days and no nights running together like a monochrome watercolor painting that never has a chance to dry, and he feels electrified.

He feels electrified, and when he opens the journal to count the pages and finds there to be only thirteen, he feels everything stop—his breathing, his heart, his thoughts.

He wonders again if maybe he just died, but as soon as he has the thought he knows that he hasn't, and then the pounding of his heart is filling his ears like a waterfall, and the world swims before him until something in his unconscious mind forces him to start breathing again.

His heart is compressing like a black hole, and there's something dark and sinuous slithering out of the void in his chest to curl around his throat, slowly tightening, and he feels cheated and tortured.

His bones are showing through the skin of his knuckles as he grips the pen and paper and thinks that hope and opportunity are the most terrible things in the world, and he was far more comfortable without them; because, like life does not exist without death, so too hope and opportunity could not exist without crippling, mind-numbing fear.

He finds it ironic, then, that the items are now stained with the blood he'd drained from his body simply so he could _feel_ something, when now he feels too much and wishes he could go back to feeling nothing at all.

He feels pathetic in a way he hasn't in along time, self-loathing in a way he hasn't in a long time, and hates the way the calm resignation has slipped from him and hates the way he wants that complacence to return because he thinks that maybe he should be better than this.

It strikes him, in that moment, for some unfathomable reason, that he's wearing a loose long-sleeve shirt and a pair of jeans, articles of clothing that seem familiar in all the wrong ways and like they don't really belong to him, and he has no idea where they came from or why he's wearing them. He finds himself aware, too, that his left wrist even with the cuff feels too light while his right feels too heavy but grips the pen with a certainty he didn't know he possessed.

But still his hand trembles as he lowers it towards the page, and he cries out and throws the pen across the cell because it isn't _fair_ that he only has one pen to write with and only thirteen pages to write on, because that isn't enough space to empty the turbid, torturous contents of his mind.

He shoves the notebook away towards the pen with his toes, and is distracted for a moment by his bare and grimy feet and the toenails he has to chew on so they don't get too long. His hair, he notices, touches his shoulders, and he wonders how long he's been here, locked in this cell.

He turns his back to the items and presses himself against the cold concrete wall, face buried against his knees, and tries to ignore their existence. He hates that he can't.

There's an itch in the back of his mind, now, like an animal scratching at a door, and his chest hitches because he thinks it might eat him, tear him to pieces, and he just wants to _sleep_ but he wonders if there's even a point to being alive if he's just sleeping, because how different can that be from death?

His thoughts are stuck on a carousel with the speed turned on high, and he can't get off, and he's _so incredibly sick of it._

There are sobs trying to jump from his chest into his throat, like salmon up a waterfall, and he loathes himself so much it _hurts,_ but he loathes everything else more.

He thinks that there's no point to being alive, hating the way that his mind keeps coming back to that conclusion but still insists on rerunning the path to that conclusion over, and over, and over again, as if the location at the end of the path will suddenly change if it's retraced just _one more time,_ and he thinks he must be insane because he thinks he's heard that only an insane person will do the same thing over and over again expecting a different result.

He thinks he must be insane, because the existence of the pen and notebook are burning into his back with the same intensity as dark, wall-blank eyes that never blink, and he feels like he's staring into an abyss, and _if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee; be careful lest thou become also a monster...  
_

Something inside of him is being bitten up and swallowed, like an apple. He can hear it crunching, but the pain is a vague, indeterminate thing, like he's ill all over.

He just wants to _sleep_ , and he laughs because it _hurts_ and it's so _ironic_ that he's been wanting pen and paper to write with for as long as he can remember, but now that he _has_ those items he can't bring himself to use them, wishing vehemently that they'd never appeared and he wasn't being taunted, _tortured_ with this opportunity, this false hope.

All he'd wanted was the ability to _write_ something, but he's suddenly painfully aware of the fact that he doesn't actually have anything _to_ write, and that even if he did, writing would be completely _meaningless._ It would change nothing.

He wonders if maybe he'll only ever want what he doesn't have, or if maybe some things are better off as dreams—should never be turned into reality where they'll be revealed to be empty and hollow, a prettily wrapped box with nothing inside.

But it is not the emptiness that is so terrible, he thinks, trembling and on the edge of falling apart, but the expectation that _something was supposed to be there_ , and that that something was supposed to be worth waiting for, fighting for, hurting for.

All the pain was supposed to be _worth something_ , but in the end it's worth _nothing_ , and everything is _meaningless_ , and he wants to cry because his thoughts are stuck on this carousel and he _can't get off._

He's so sick and tired of it, the weariness settled deep in his bones like the freezing temperatures that lead to hypothermia, and he wants the carousel to _stop_ because he's dizzy and so, so _sick_ , but he knows that the only way to make it stop is to die and he _doesn't want to die,_ and it all _hurts,_ and it's all so _absolutely fucking hilarious_.

And there's nothing for him to to do but laugh; and so he laughs, laughs so hard that his jaw aches and his lips split and his abs cramp and he can't _breathe._ His laughter echoes back to him around the walls of the cell, loud and delighted and deranged and breathless, and he thinks that if he were in a story he would certainly be the villain, because he's pretty sure that only villains laugh like this.

He feels _insane_ , and he wonders if anyone else has ever felt so beautifully, incredibly, elatedly _alive_.


	22. chapter xx: futility

**futility**

The notebook and the pen were still there, across the cell from him and stuck to the floor by dried blood. He glared at them with what meager energy he could muster.

He gave up quickly, though, turned his face away and stared sightlessly up at the ceiling.

He possessed a dark, chilly feeling, like an autumn night inside his chest, heavy and damp with fog that blotted out the stars and the complete absence of a moon. He felt like his body was trying to submerge itself into the floor while his arms and legs gently tried to drift away from him.

He thought about the notebook and the pen, and the thoughts made him wish there were food in his stomach, just so he could throw it up.

He closed his eyes, felt himself sinking.

All he could do was write, but he couldn't even get himself to do that. The thought of writing made him want to die.

He'd rather just lie there, half-alive, then give the people who imprisoned him the satisfaction of watching him make a futile attempt to create something and give himself meaning.

His life was meaningless, just like the strange white symbols on the notebook's cover, and needed no marker aside from the blood all over the floor, the walls, the ceiling.

The pen and notebook, too, had blood on them.

Any words he could write, he was sure, would be bloody; solemn notes of meaningless life, comforting pain, inevitable death. Writing his own epitaph (as if he'd actually get one).

He'd lose, if he decided to write, and the idea of losing made his ribs tighten like talons around his lungs.

He realized that deciding not to write, though, was also losing, because it meant he was giving up.

No matter what he did, then, he lost. (He was not in any position to win anything)

But at least if he didn't write, then there would be nothing for the people who imprisoned him to read; nothing for them to misinterpret, misunderstand, warp into whatever terrible fact would further their agenda—if they even had one, which they must, because he was sure that life and time outside his cell must have some kind of structure; rules that needed to be followed, expectations that needed to be met, moralities that needed to be upheld.

But inside his cell there were no expectations, no rules, no right and no wrong, and thus no point in writing anything.

(The only reason he would have to write something would be to hurt someone, and there was no one there for him to hurt but himself.)


	23. chapter xxi: inevitability

**inevitability**

There was something wrong with his story, he realized, in that it wasn't a story at all.

No story could contain only one person, after all, and in the cell it was only him.

He was nothing but ink on a page of a closed book that was never again going to be opened, left collecting dust on the top of a shelf and waiting its turn to be burned.

He did not know how long he had waited, nor how long he had yet to wait. His only measure of time was in breaths and heartbeats.

He wondered, if he measured time in inhales and exhales, could he get time to stop by holding his breath? Or if he measured time in heartbeats, would time stop when he died?

He could not remember his story's beginning, and the ending had not arrived, nor did he expect to encounter it anytime soon—he was stuck perpetually in the middle, without edges.

There could be no satisfying ending to his story, he knew; no resolution.

He was locked in this cell for killing people, and—from what he thought that he maybe remembered—for killing them without any trace of remorse; without even blinking.

They could never let him free, but nor could they kill him. His death would mean nothing if he did not remember what he did. It would be a bitter, hollow victory.

No, better not to kill him; better to just lock him away and try to forget.

He turned his head slightly, feeling the vertebrae in his neck creak like ancient, unoiled hinges, and looked at the pen and notebook, wondering if he could write anything that could become some kind of victory.

All he could do was write, and he wondered if it would not be pathetic if he didn't even take the opportunity; if it would not be pathetic if he didn't do all that he could, however petty.

He thought that, at one point, he could have changed the world, and he hated the idea of writing, now, knowing that it would change nothing.

The fact that there were a limited number of pages, too, meant that there had to be an ending, and he wondered if he could write himself an ending that would be satisfying, because the only ending he could see was death, which was the inevitable one (but there was nothing more cliché than death).

He laughed, then, because he realized that his story had the exact same ending as that of anyone else, no matter that he was confined and quite possibly losing his mind while they were all free to walk under a sky that they never even bothered to look at.

(What he wouldn't give just to see the stars again.)

His lips peeled apart and split, hot liquid trickling over his chin, and he crawled over to the notebook and pen, flipping it open to the middle and writing a single sentence that tasted like victory.

(He didn't recognize his handwriting.)

He closed the notebook and then carefully tossed it through the bars of his cell, far enough that he wouldn't be able to reach it even if he wanted to.

He kept the pen, though, and stabbed it into the flesh of his foot, still with an inky hatred in his heart and a bloody smirk on his lips.

It didn't matter that he was locked away.

…

 _One day you'll die, too, and I won't be what killed you._


	24. chapter xxii: demonization

**demonization**

There were monsters with him in his cell.

They were freakish things, vaguely humanoid but seemingly cobbled together from random pieces of bones, skin, scales, fur, feathers. Their movements were jerkish, like puppets.

He was pretty sure they weren't alive, but neither were they dead. Kind of like him. Maybe he was one of them.

They were playing a dice game with him, talking with strange, resonating voices that grated on his ears like auditory sandpaper, splinters, small rockslides.

They were playing a dice game with him, and he was winning even though he wasn't doing anything. It almost seemed as if losing the game was the way to win it.

The monsters chatted about how there was nothing to do in this place, which he agreed with, and they told him that he needed to kill someone soon, or else he'd die.

He tried to tell them that he'd already killed lots of people, but he didn't remember how he did it, but they just laughed at him and told him he was a strange one.

For such strange beings to call him strange, he must, he figured, be extremely strange indeed.

They offered him the dice, but he told them that he didn't need to roll them, because he was already winning, and rolling them would make him lose, because that was what they wanted him to do, and winning was doing exactly the opposite of what everyone wanted.

They told him that wasn't how the game worked, and urged him to roll again, but he told them that it was, in fact, how the game worked, because he was the one who was making the rules.

They laughed at him, told him he had some nerve, thinking himself King.

This was his cell, he told them, so yes, in fact, he was King.

They just laughed at him again, clattering sounds like bones rattling around, and told him that he couldn't be King if he was dead, and he told them that he didn't see why not.

They started taking bets on how much longer he was going to live, but he knew that they were all going to lose.

He was an insane mass murderer, and he would be written down in history, become a monster of bedtime stories. He was never going to die.

He was going to become more and more terrible with time, and the world would never be free of him.


	25. chapter xxiii: terror

**terror**

The voices hounded him.

He wanted to sleep, but he _couldn't_ , because the voices _wouldn't shut up_ , and he wanted them to _stop_ but they _wouldn't._

The voices _wouldn't shut up_ , and his eyes were stinging, and the voices were loud, they were so, so _loud,_ and he wanted to deafen himself, wanted to put his hands over his ears but he _couldn't_ because his wrists were cuffed together, and he needed to cover his ears, he needed to _not hear them anymore he needed the cuffs off._

He screamed, screamed to try to drown them out, screamed as loud as he could, screamed until his throat was raw but he could _still hear them_ , and he yanked at the cuffs until metal pressed against bone and they were slick, slick with ink, and he desperately hooked the chain connecting the cuffs around his feet and _yanked._

There was a _crack_ as the joint of one of his thumbs broke, and he hurriedly wrenched it out of the metal circlet, hands to his ears and ears filling with ink, but no matter how hard he pressed his palms against his head he could _still hear them._

He was sobbing, and the voices were in the walls, the floor, all around him, and he lurched to his feet, tried desperately to escape his cell, yanking at the bars and begging to be let out because _the voices were talking and they wouldn't stop please he needed to get away please please they were eating him, ripping him apart, please, he couldn't take it any more, please, please make it stop._

But he was weak. He was so, so weak, and his arms gave out, and his legs, and the floor was waiting with its cold embrace and the voices surrounded him, monsters crawling out of the stone and laughing as they dug their sharp fingers deep into his chest, into his heart and _pulled._

He gasped, staring with wide eyes as they plucked his heart from him, held it beating in their hands and laughed as they clenched their scaly fingers around it, and he screamed and screamed but they wouldn't _stop._

Ink dripped over their claws, his heart beating desperately outside of his chest, and they laughed, they wouldn't stop _laughing,_ wouldn't _shut up_ , and he couldn't argue when they told him that he didn't know who he was; he didn't know anything.

They told him that the sky was red, there were no such thing as stars, that walls didn't have eyes, that dreams were death, that he was insane, but he knew they were wrong about all of it, because _they_ were the ones who were insane, not him, and the sky was gray and that stars were cold to the touch and the walls had eyes that never blinked and dreams were doorways to other rooms and death tasted like angel cake and was sweet but without substance like a cloud except it hurt like hell.

He begged them to let him sleep, but they told him that he wasn't allowed to sleep because sleep was only for people who had done good things, and he'd done very, very bad things, so he wasn't allowed to sleep, and when he tried to curl away and close his eyes, cover his ears, they poked him and prodded him all over with sharp fingers, hooked his skin with needles and thread and _pulled._

He tried to squirm away, but they started sewing him up, telling him that he was falling apart and needed to be fixed, but he needn't worry, they were there to help him, and they started sewing his lips shut and his eyelids open, started sewing broken wings to his back, and he tried to scream but his throat wouldn't _work._

His throat was dry, cracked, and when he tried to crawl to the faucet for water they destroyed it, poured ink down his throat instead, and he choked on it, and when he sobbed it was ink, not tears, that stung his eyes and trailed down his cheeks.

One of the creatures ate his heart, and when he didn't die they laughed and called him a monster, and he couldn't deny it because he'd felt nothing.

But he knew that even if he was a monster, he was still better than all the other monsters, and when he pulled himself up they watched in surprise and in trepidation, and when, feeling a terrible and powerful darkness radiating from within him, he told them he was their God, they slowly lowered to their knees and bowed their heads, shivering.

He told them to die for him; and when everything was silent (except for the sound of liquid dripping; slow, thick, and unceasing) he leaned over and vomited up ink.

He straightened, then, wiped his mouth with a hand, right thumb dangling from its socket, metal cuffs dangling from his left wrist, and felt free.

(The ink was still trickling out from behind his teeth.)

He stared over the monsters' skulls at the darkness dripping down the bars of his cell, and knew that he would never sleep again.


	26. chapter xxiv: finality

**finality**

Death, when it finally came for him, had fathomless black eyes and a childish smile.

He had the feeling that he'd seen the face before, and it struck him that maybe he'd been dead all that time and just hadn't realized it.

(There was no Heaven or Hell.)

* * *

 **END.**


	27. epilogue: deadlock

**an:** I like the previous chapter as the ending, especially since I know that the manga writers said that in the Death Note verse when people die they go to Mu (nothingness), but this is a bonus optional epilogue to this story if there were an afterlife.

This is also the first chapter of my story _ash,_ which is a kind of AU sequel to this one, because I really wanted to see L and Light's interactions after everything (and I kind of just didn't want to stop writing for this story even though it was over).

* * *

 **epilogue: deadlock**

Lawliet, when Light found him, was crouched on the edge of nothingness and holding a piece of cake.

Light's footsteps made no noise and he was not breathing, but Lawliet sensed him anyway.

'I hated seeing you that way, Kira.'

Light sat down next to him. 'I know.'

Lawliet looked at him sideways, eyes like shadowed prison walls. 'Did you do that just to anger me?'

The sky, when Light looked at it, was heavy with gray mist, and starless. 'Like you said, L: Kira is childish, and hates to lose.'

'You hate to lose so badly that you would rather demean and destroy yourself than admit defeat.' It wasn't a question.

Light looked at him. 'You did the same thing, you know.'

The fork paused in the air. 'I did not know that you saw it that way.' The fork moved again, carving off a piece of the cake.

'Yes, you did,' said Light.

'Yes, I did,' agreed Lawliet, and held the fork with the bite of cake out towards him. 'Do you want some cake, Kira?'

'No.'

'Are you sure?'

'Yes.'

Lawliet turned his dark gaze away, and the fork retreated. 'More for me, then.'

Light looked out over the nothingness before them, and Lawliet ate his cake.

'I'm not sorry,' said Light, after a long time.

'Neither am I, Kira.' The second to last bite of cake was balancing on the fork. 'Last chance for cake, by the way.'

Light glanced at him. 'We're dead, L.'

'I know that, Kira.' The piece of cake was eaten.

'Yeah, I know,' said Light, almost petulant. 'But the least you could do is act like it.'

'I do not plan on giving Kira that satisfaction,' said Lawliet, almost vindictive.

'Yeah,' said Light, and sighed without breath. 'I figured it was too much to hope for.'

Lawliet scooped up the last piece of cake, staring at it. 'Well, Kira always _was_ delusional.'

Light gestured to the fork. 'What does it taste like? The cake?'

'Regret,' answered Lawliet, meeting his gaze without expression. 'Want to try some?'

'No.'

'Suit yourself,' said Lawliet, looking away, but the piece of cake did not disappear into his mouth.

Light was watching him. 'I'm curious, though, what it is that the great _L_ regrets.'

The piece of cake was carefully laid back down on the plate. 'I'd be entertained to hear you guess.'

The sky was just as gray and starless as the last time Light had looked at it, and all the times before that, as well.

'You regret not finishing that last piece of cake, don't you,' said Light, after a while.

Lawliet was almost smiling. 'Kira knows me quite well.'

Light shrugged. 'Know thy enemy, as they say.'

'Yes,' agreed Lawliet, watching him. 'And Kira does not regret anything.'

Light almost smiled. 'No,' he agreed, 'I suppose at this point I don't.'


End file.
